


The Writing on the Wall

by Rhinozilla



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Gen, Supernatural vibes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-02
Updated: 2016-09-02
Packaged: 2018-08-12 12:04:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7933954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhinozilla/pseuds/Rhinozilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every town was an abandoned town nowadays, but this one in particular was just…unsettling. Daryl and Michonne stop for supplies while on their hunt between S3 and S4.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Writing on the Wall

The welcome sign for the town of Hatteras boasted a population of 650, but the main street that Daryl and Michonne entered on showed no signs of anybody, dead or otherwise. The air was still, not even breeze enough to move American flag, which had been left lowered to half mast outside the red brick courthouse at the end of the street. The unnerving calmness of the spotless road made the hair on both their necks rise. The cracked asphalt of the street cut through the middle of the town, the last kiss of summer’s heat kicking the dust off the concrete and any grass that had dared to poke through the weaknesses. The side-by-side buildings rose on either side of the main street like the parted Red Sea. The mental image of the structures’ faces crashing in as a wave of splintered wood and brick left an eerie chill down Daryl’s spine.

“Let’s grab what we can and go,” Michonne’s tone echoed his discomfort with the place.

They left the beat up jeep in the middle of the street. The obnoxious ring alerting them that they had left the doors open echoed off the faces of the convenience store, pharmacy, and barber shop on either side of the road. He took one step back and elbowed the door shut. The beeping stopped, but he swore the sound echoed mockingly off the unbroken glass that glinted morning sunlight.

There were no broken windows. He noticed it before he realized that he’d noticed it, and by then it was too late to stop noticing the bizarre nature of this town. Michonne had beelined toward the convenience store. From their independent experiences for the past year and a half on the road, they both had learned that convenience stores, grocery shops, and any place that sold any kind of food were always the first places to get hit by earlier survivors. Daryl sometimes thought that his group had been the last damned band of humans to move through this part of Georgia, just looking at how everything else had been cleaned out by the time they reached it. They were always worth checking though; sometimes a can of beans or a bottle of water got overlooked by the priors.

There were no vehicles in Hatteras. No cars, no trucks, no minivans, not even a damn scooter. The banged up blue jeep that he and Michonne had hotwired before leaving the prison a few days ago was alone on the road. Daryl realized that he’d swung the crossbow from his shoulders and had it poised in his hands without consciously deciding to. It was second nature by then. The weight of it was familiar and reassuring, but at the moment, it just felt like a weight. There was nothing to fight around here. He approached the pharmacy, squinting at the windows but unable to see anything of the interior. The door was unlocked, and it swung inward on screeching hinges as he pushed inside.

Empty shelves and cleared bins greeted him. He had half expected as much. Last damned band of humans…He wandered down a few aisles anyway. Hershel had more or less said that any kind of medicine should be scavenged. So no matter how ass backwards some of the names of that shit was, Daryl tried to grab any bottles that got left behind, particularly any of the names he recognized from pre-Turn Saturday nights at the Dixon house. Or Friday nights. Or Sunday afternoons. Fuck.

Didn’t matter. There wasn’t anything there. Nothing on the shelves. Nothing behind the counter. Nothing in the compressing walls in the back room. Not even a bag of damn cough drops. With a huff, he left the shop empty handed only to find Michonne emerging from the convenience store next door, also empty handed.

“It’s cleared out too?” she asked, looking more on edge by the passing second.

“Yeah. Reckon somebody’s holed up around here, done emptied the whole damn place of anything useful,” he grunted.

She shook her head, “They wouldn’t take everything. And it’s all gone. Not just the food or the batteries and tools…Electronics, the cash in the register, even the perishables that woulda gone bad just weeks after the Turn. Meticulous.”

Daryl frowned, moving past her to glance into the store to see for himself. Sure enough, it looked like it had gotten the same treatment as whoever got into the pharmacy. Empty. Vacant. Cleared out like it had never been stocked in the first place. No signs of a mad scramble or a panic. It looked like people had just neatly and calmly packed up every last damned fucking piece of anything that wasn’t bolted to the floor. Everything, just like the people, seemed to have just vanished in the air like smoke.

He heard the now-familiar sound of Michonne’s katana sliding out of the sheath, and he backed out of the doorway.

“Walkers?” he hissed, scanning the street.

She was standing just off the sidewalk, sword in one hand, posture lax.

“No. That’s the point. This place…This whole town…There’s nothing here.” She made a vague gesture with her free hand. “No walkers. No cars. All the doors are unlocked, because there’s nothing to steal. No vandalism. No end of days posters. No cars. No broken glass or boarded windows.”

“Think they just up and left? Evacuated? Heard some places tried to do that.” he mused aloud as they made their way back to the jeep.

“Little one horse town like this? I don’t think the news of everything would have reached them until the walkers were already at their door,” she stated. “Remember the military flocking to the big cities? I bet a town this size only got one squad car, maybe two.”

Either way, he thought, there weren’t any supplies to be got here. The sooner they got outta dodge, the faster the chill in his shoulders would go away. The bloodless buildings and well kept street reminded him too much of Woodbury, except while that place had had people and gunfire and action, Hatteras had…silence. That was a whole different kind of violence in this world. It made his ears hurt.

He was closer to the driver’s side of the jeep, so he popped open the door first while Michonne started around to the passenger side. The dinging bell of the open door split across the barren streets like a scream through a cave, and they both jumped at it.

Daryl rolled his neck once, swung the crossbow inside, and then climbed into the seat, closing the door with a little more force than was necessary. Michonne slid into the opposite seat like a cat, eyes on alert through the windshield as he got the engine started.

“What do you think happened?” she asked.

“Some weird shit. I don’t wanna stick around and play Inspector Gadget to find out,” he mumbled, throwing the stick into drive and pulling the jeep forward.

“You mean Sherlock Holmes?” she raised an eyebrow. “Inspector Gadget didn’t really…”

He cast her a flat look and she lifted her hands, trailing away and looking out of her window instead. As they passed through the heart of the town, passing the courthouse and angling toward the town limits, the air that pushed through the vents on the dashboard rattled slightly.

Michonne recoiled just as the smell hit him too.

“The Hell is that? Something burning?” he shut off the air to kill the flow.

“Ugh, like sulfur,” she waved her hand in front of her to ward off the odor.

The smell passed after a few blocks, but it did nothing to set either of them at ease as they passed a sign on the way out that happily stated “Thanks for stopping by! Come back soon!”

No way in Hell, he internally replied.

He couldn’t even put a finger on why the ‘ghost town’ of Hatteras had gotten under his skin so much. Wasn’t exactly a ‘ghost town’ neither. It was just…empty…of everything.

Curiosity got the better of him, and Daryl glanced into the side mirror. The lone street stretched back like a black tongue into the bowels of the town, with the last two buildings at the town line standing at three stories tall like guard towers.

The blue paint on the white brick jumped out at him.

It was a word spray painted by a crude hand on the wall, like a warning. The spatter of blood after the last letter was approximately the head height of a person, like a grisly punctuation mark. There was no body. There was never a body where blood was anymore. The word loomed off the brick though, and he swilled it around in his mouth silently.

Croatoan.

The word didn’t ring any bells, but all the same, his foot weighed a little heavier on the accelerator as they left the town of Hatteras behind them.


End file.
